Sponsored by Fresh Promotions:
The financial success of most businesses lies in positive return on marketing investment. Many small businesses fail because there is insufficient capital to run ongoing promotional activity and one or two failed campaigns can exhaust the available budget. Generally, media advertising is expensive and its results difficult to predict, so many small business operators are caught in a bind where the investment needed to grow their business and increase revenues potentially risks emptying the bank account and making the future uncertain.
This is why many small business operators have found that promotional products are an effective way to increase brand awareness without the inherent risks of a broader media promotional strategy. Here are seven reasons why the targeted use of promotional merchandise gives a small business control over its marketing costs.
1. Controlled Release of Your Marketing Activity
Sometimes your new home business has to fit in with the demands made by home and family life. It’s not always possible to deal with a high volume of inquiries that can come all at once from general media advertising. Promotional products can be distributed when it suits you in bursts of activity while you still take advantage of buying in bulk to reduce the unit price.
When you have time and capacity to deal with the response, you can schedule your promotional activity to fit in with the rest of your life, which is often the whole point of wanting to run a home business in the first place.
2. Easy Market Segmentation
In general media advertising, it’s impossible to tailor individual messages for different market segments. As a result, much of the potential impact of your marketing can be lost and a high proportion of promotional budget wasted.
As you know exactly which business prospect will receive each promotional merchandise offering, you can ensure the product and message it carries are specifically tailored to appeal top the recipient. Not only does this lead to a higher level of return on investment, it also ensures that in the longer term, your promotional gift has a higher chance of being retained and influencing its new owner, extending the lifespan of your marketing activity.
3. Creates Recognition and Opportunity
As a small business operator, you have to accept that in the initial stages of building your business, you will be fighting to take business from another established supplier. Often this means you will be relying on a competitor to drop the ball or otherwise disappoint your client prospect. In this case you have to be ready as an alternate supplier
4. Budget Control
With advertising in a magazine or buying keyword traffic from a search engine, you can never be certain of the return on your marketing investment. Using promotional products, you know exactly how much you are spending on each potential client, and you can tailor the cost of the product offering to match the potential value of the client. Also, a promotional product has an ongoing benefit in creating awareness of your product and service offerings beyond its initial impact.
5. Create a Personal Relationship
Business is all about the relationships you can create with your clients, suppliers, and staff, and branded merchandise is a proven way to build relationships. The right branded item will become a part of the daily business life of the recipient. If your contact details and branding are on hand on a promotional item, the probability that you’ll get the call when your products or services are required is increased dramatically. Many times, users of promotional merchandise report that they have received a call from a new client months or years after the initial distribution of the offering.
6. Create a Point of Distinction
Branding a promotional item allows you to trade off the image that merchandise has in the market. This simplifies the often long-term efforts required to create a favorable image in the mind of prospective clients while providing the recipient with an item with genuine practical value. For instance, a custom power bank which allows the recipient to recharge their cell phone or tablet computer on the road would be likely to be kept close at hand and create a positive impression of your company every time it saved the day.
7. Trade Off Current Events
Most people are engaged with news and current affairs and choosing a promotional merchandise item related to something on the front page of the papers can multiply the effective impact of your marketing message. It could simply be the message you add by way of custom branding which leverages your return on promotional investment to another level, rather than choosing a specific product. it’s even better if the message and the product combine to become more powerful in order to successfully get the attention of your audience.
I believe that promotional merchandise works for almost every business, especially for home businesses. To the seven points listed above I would add the fact that promotional merchandise can be used as a business card. The customer recognises the brand due to its special features (e.g. a business which sells cookies introduces a No-Sugar Day for Diabetics and advertise it properly).